HJAR May/Jun 2021

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS I  MAY / JUN 2021 33 For weekly eNews updates and to read the journal online, visit HealthcareJournalAR.com Program. Shalin joined UAMS in 2012 as a faculty member in the Departments of Dermatology and Pathol- ogy. She has held several leadership roles within the Department of Pathology. Since 2017, she has served as the director of the UAMS MD/PhD com- bined degree program. UAMS Division for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Receives $800K Grant to Launch Academy for Arkansas Students The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has received an $800,000 grant from the Arkansas Division of Workforce Services Temporary Assis- tance for Needed Families program. Funding will support the creation of a Path- ways Academy, a comprehensive learning and community engagement program focusing on science, technology, engineering, and mathe- matics (STEM) for students in public middle and high schools across Arkansas. The annual grant is renewable for up to five years, or a potential com- mitment of $4 million. “The Pathways Academy is meant to not only give students the opportunity to explore and pur- sue careers in science and health care fields, but to build bridges of community engagement and education in communities with underrepresented minority populations, opening doors for clinical and translation research as well,” said Brian Git- tens, EdD, MPA, UAMS vice chancellor for diver- sity, equity, and inclusion. The Pathways Academy program will use online tools to engage selected Pathways Scholars from families eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and help prepare those students for careers in STEM and healthcare fields, with opportunities for mentoring, tutoring, attending conferences and seminars, internships, summer programming, and technology-based technical training. The program will also engage the parents of Pathways Scholars by hosting workshops meant to help them in supporting their child’s academic career and will also provide training for scholars’ teachers. “The achievement gap for socioeconomi- cally disadvantaged students and students from minority backgrounds is well documented in terms of graduation and matriculation rates,” said Gittens. “Our purpose with this program is equity and providing resources to those who need them to prepare them for further academic and career advancement.” Immediate program goals include staffing to support curriculum and program development and administration, said Gittens. This staff will then begin the work of recruitment of students, parents, and teachers. “Our long-term goal is to grow to include 1,200 students statewide,” said Gittens. “We want to empower them, as well as their parents and teachers, to break the cycle of poverty with opportunities for education and employment and to create partnerships that help us eliminate dis- parities in health and wellness across the entire state.” CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs Cancer Center Earns National Accreditation from the Commission on Cancer of the American College of Surgeons The CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs Cancer Center was granted three-year accreditation by the Com- mission on Cancer (CoC), a quality program of the American College of Surgeons. To earn voluntary CoC accreditation, a cancer program must meet 34 CoC quality care standards, be evaluated every three years through a survey process, and main- tain levels of excellence in the delivery of com- prehensive patient-centered care. “This accreditation is a tangible sign of our commitment to serving Hot Springs and our entire Southwest Arkansas community by pro- viding the highest quality of compassionate care for our cancer patients,” said CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs President Douglas Ross. “Our patients can rest assured that when they come to CHI Vin- cent Hot Springs, they benefit from the full con- tinuum of cancer care drawing from the extensive expertise of our entire healthcare team.” As a CoC-accredited cancer center, CHI St. Vin- cent Hot Springs Cancer Center takes a multidis- ciplinary approach to treating cancer as a com- plex group of diseases that requires consultation among surgeons; medical and radiation oncolo- gists; diagnostic radiologists; pathologists; and other cancer specialists. This multidisciplinary partnership results in improved patient care. The CoC Accreditation Program also provides the framework for CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs to improve its quality of patient care through various cancer-related programs that focus on the full spectrum of cancer care including pre- vention, early diagnosis, cancer staging, opti- mal treatment, rehabilitation, life-long follow-up for recurrent disease and end-of-life care. When patients receive care at a CoC facility, they also have access to information on clinical trials and new treatments, genetic counseling and patient centered services including psycho-social sup- port, a patient navigation process, and a survi- vorship care plan that documents the care each patient receives and seeks to improve cancer sur- vivors’ quality of life. Like all CoC-accredited facilities, CHI St. Vin- cent Hot Springs Cancer Center maintains a can- cer registry and contributes data to the National Cancer Database (NCDB), a joint program of the CoC and American Cancer Society. This nation- wide oncology outcomes database is the larg- est clinical disease registry in the world. Data on all types of cancer are tracked and analyzed through the NCDB and used to explore trends in cancer care. CoC-accredited cancer centers, in turn, have access to information derived from this type of data analysis, which is used to create national, regional and state benchmark reports. These reports help CoC facilities with their qual- ity improvement efforts. With more than 1,500 CoC-accredited can- cer programs in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, CoC- accredited facilities diagnose and/or treat more than 70% of all newly diagnosed patients with cancer. UAMS Researcher Cannon Awarded Nearly $1M to Study Vaccination Against Ovarian Cancer Martin J. Cannon, PhD, a professor at the Uni- versity of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), has been awarded an Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA) grant of $900,000 to study den- dritic cell vaccination against ovarian cancer. A dendritic cell is a unique immune cell that boosts immune responses by displaying antigens